Claire Saylor Series

West Berlin, 1979. Helen Abell oversees the CIA's network of safe houses, rare havens amidst the dangerous milieu of a city in the grips of the Cold War. Helen's world is upended when she overhears a meeting between two people speaking a coded language that hints at shadowy realities far beyond her comprehension. Before the day is out, she witnesses a second unauthorised encounter. Her attempts to expose the dark truths about what she has witnessed will bring about repercussions that reach across decades and continents into the present day.

Paris, October 1999. CIA agent Claire Saylor is looking after low-level surveillance ops. Her career has stalled after a misguided dalliance with her handler Paul Bridger - so when Bridger asks Claire to join a team, she prepares herself for a stint on tea duties. But in fact, he's finally put her back in the game. She'll be going undercover as the wife of Professor Winston Armitage - an expert in the Quran and its translations. He's presenting his controversial new theory on the fabled promise of 72 virgins for each martyr and needs protection.

On a chilly early morning walk on the wooded outskirts of Berlin, Emil Grimm finds the body of his neighbor, a fellow Stasi officer named Lothar, with a gunshot wound to the temple and a pistol in his right hand. Despite appearances, Emil suspects murder. A few months earlier he would have known just what to do, but now, as East Germany disintegrates, being a Stasi colonel is more of a liability than an asset. More troubling still is that Emil and Lothar were involved in a final clandestine mission, one that has clearly turned deadly.